Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door by Roy Wenzl, Tim Potter, L. Kelly, Hurst Laviana Page A

month.
     
    On March 10, one month after the news conference, police arrested a man they thought might be BTK. He fit their profile, had connections to some victims, and bought clothesline one day as the cops watched in surveillance.
    LaMunyon was so confident they had the right man that he told Eagle reporters in the city hall pressroom that this was the guy. He handed them background information about him and said that tests were being done to show that his blood type matched that of the semen found at the Otero house.
    The reporters typed furiously, assuming they were writing the most sensational story in city history. But LaMunyon stopped by the pressroom that evening.
    “It’s not him,” LaMunyon said.
    Everybody stopped typing.
    “The blood test rules him out.”
     
    Like the two detectives who were willing to sit in the Otero house with a psychic, LaMunyon was now ready to try any idea. Soon after the news conference, with help from the news staff at KAKE, he tried communicating with BTK through subliminal suggestion. Police in Wichita had never tried it before; they would never try it again.
    With his letter, BTK had sent his drawing of Nancy Fox; it was so detailed that it showed Fox’s glasses lying on a dresser near the bed. Police thought that might be important.
    They had noticed that most of BTK’s victims wore glasses. In his first letter, he had mentioned where Josie Otero’s glasses were left in the house. Perhaps glasses meant something to him.
    By this time, police were even thinking that maybe BTK hunted women based in part on their eye color. Or perhaps it was hair color or age, some said.
    LaMunyon arranged a personal appearance on a KAKE newscast to talk about BTK. And as he spoke, an image flashed on-screen for only a fraction of a second: a drawing of a pair of glasses, with the words “Now Call the Chief.”
    BTK did not call.
    Other people did; the cops got hundreds of tips. None panned out.
     
    On October 2, 1978, the police department hired a new patrol officer. He was a native of Wichita, from the rough-around-the-edges west side. He had graduated six years earlier from Bishop Carroll Catholic High School, and he was still a few credits shy of graduating from WSU with a history degree.
    That robbery in the clothing store nearly a year before still weighed on Kenny Landwehr’s mind. He had decided not to apply to the FBI.
    At a family funeral, he had pulled his father, Lee, off to the side to talk. He told him that he was going to drop out of college to enter Wichita’s police academy. He wanted to fight crime on the street.
    Lee Landwehr sighed.
    “Okay,” his father said. “But let’s not tell your mother yet.”
    When Landwehr broke the news to her a few days later, she did not complain. But she was more scared than she let on.

    Rookie cop Kenny Landwehr never wanted to be chief�his dream was to head the homicide unit someday.
    At the application interview, a police supervisor asked the twenty-three-year-old Landwehr a standard question: What do you want to do with your career?
    The standard answer from enthusiastic recruits was, I want to be chief of police someday.
    But this recruit said, “I want to work in homicide.”
    His interviewer was surprised: You don’t want to be chief?
    “No,” Landwehr said. “I want to command the homicide unit someday.”

16
    1979
    Ambush and Alibis
    On April 28, 1979, more than a year after BTK’s last letter, a sixty-three-year-old widow named Anna Williams arrived home about 11:00 PM from a night out square dancing. She found the door to a spare bedroom open, a vanity drawer open, and clothes on the floor. Someone had stolen jewelry, clothing, and a sock in which she had hidden $35.
    When she found the phone line was dead, she ran.
     
    Weeks later, on June 14, a clerk opening the downtown post office near Central and Main found a man waiting for her at 4:00 AM. He handed her a package.
    “Put this in the KAKE box,” he said.
    The